Anti-Spam: Manual Approval Of New Forum Members?

[Guest JimmyTheSaint]

The spam has been getting more frequent. I assume they're not bots, but rather very poor people who are paid almost nothing to manually register and spam. Any chance of having mods manually review new account registrations? I forget if registration requires clicking an email activation link or not, so maybe that's also worth trying.

[Guest JimmyTheSaint]

Right now, the first 23 topics at the BitTorrent Sync discussion are all spam. That's the entire first page and part of the second. Any possibility of stricter controls on membership? I mean, that kind of density basically precludes user participation.

[Firon]

Topics are removed and I've done a couple of things to hopefully reduce the spam further. I'd like to avoid having to moderate all new member's posts though. Let's see if it works!

 

Also, I've promoted you to a mod, since you've been a helpful, active user on the forums.

If you do see any other spammers go through, it helps to flag them as a spammer. Just hover over their name and click on the flag.

[Guest JimmyTheSaint]

OK, will continue to play whackamole with spam in the BT Sync forum. But as long as this is non-bot spamming, in my experience the only thing you can do is manually approve new accounts and exclude the places of known spammers-for-hire. You don't have to moderate new members' posts, just their initial sign-up. I forget if these forums require verification via email, but that helps.

[Firon]

Well, I added some extra things to catch more known spammers (which should catch the low-paid humans doing it).

And yeah, the forums do require verification via email. It also already was blocking about 1/3 of registrations for spam, so it wasn't entirely ineffective.

[Firon]

Any better yet?

[Harold Feit]

I've killed at least 3 20+ post spam accounts in the past 12 hours, so "not much"